Performance Artists, Scholars Explore Body's Relation to Technology
October 23, 2000
University Park, Pa. -- Has technology redefined what it means to be human? That's the issue at the heart of an upcoming symposium at The Pennsylvania State University. Performative Sites: Intersecting Art, Technology, and the Body, October 24-28, 2000, at the Penn Stater Conference Center in State College, Pennsylvania, will respond to this question through performances, lectures, and panel presentations by internationally renowned performance artists and scholars who address the effects of technology on art, the body, and identity.

Imagine the condition of people living a thousand years ago. Physically, they were much the same as we are. Without mechanical transport, though, few traveled far from their home villages. Without telephones, they spoke only face-to-face. Without printing presses or electronic media, they passed along knowledge through an oral tradition or patiently transcribed manuscripts. Developments such as eyeglasses, artificial knees, and hearing aids were centuries in the future. Although the people of 1000 CE certainly used technology, they did not dream of uses that would change, modify, enhance or invade their bodies and influence their understanding of themselves or their world.

The subtle invasion of technology accelerated in the Twentieth Century. By the 1970s technology's impact on the human body and identity had been interpreted through popular culture. Blade Runner, Star Trek, and The Six Million-Dollar Man developed the concept of the mechanized human-the cyborg. Today, more than 10% of the U.S. population use pacemakers, hearing aids, artificial knees, hips and other prosthetic devices that qualify them to be considered cyborgs. For them, technology has had a direct impact on their conception of what it means to be human.

In the Performative Sites symposium, Penn State faculty members Charles Garoian and Yvonne Gaudelius have created a forum for performance artists and theorists to explore ways technology impacts the body and its identity. "The artists will examine how technology determines who we are and how we function in Society," Garoian, a professor of art education, says.

"Participants in the symposium will challenge historical ways of looking at art, identity, and what it means to be human. They will interpret the intersection of technology and the body-'the machine and the meat'-in ways that call into question values extracted from religion, philosophy, and culture," Garoian, himself a performance artist, adds.

"Can we stand back and critically analyze the choices technology allows us to make?" Gaudelius, an assistant professor of art education and women's studies asks. "The Performative Sites symposium focuses on ways technology helps construct our understandings of what it means to be human. Look at the impact of the Internet. Now you can create an avatar, a virtual presence, to act for you in cyberspace. You can determine the characteristics of that image and how it acts for you. or consider the example of Orlan, one of the artists who will be at the symposium. She has 'performed' by having medical operations that have changed her body and thus the way that she perceives herself and is perceived by others. She has become her own work of art, her own expression of the intersection of art, the body, and technology."

Among the other artists who will appear at the symposium are Australian performance artist Stelarc, who often uses a mechanical third hand or other prosthetics, and the duo osseus labyrint , who perform suspended nude above the audience as they engage in contortions that mold flesh into strange and alien shapes evoking nonhuman forms. The erratic, anxious movements of Goat Island's cadre of performers reverberate with the residual echoes of technology's impact on the body and on identity. And, in Zoller Gallery of the School of Visual Arts, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes will perform Aztechnology, an installation/diorama that will examine and critique the political and cultural stereotypes associated with identity.

Leading cultural theorists who will lead sessions at the symposium include N. Katherine Hayles, Peggy Phelan, Richard Coyne, Drew Leder, and Amelia Jones. "From a variety of perspectives these speakers will inform us about what it might mean to be 'post-human,' " Gaudelius says.

The conference is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. It is cosponsored by fifteen Penn State colleges and departments and is endorsed by the Center for Performance Research, Performance Studies International, and Franklin Furnace.

More information about the symposium is available on the Web at http://www.sva.psu.edu/performativesites/

Tickets to individual evening performances are available for $10 each, $35 for the week-long series, at Eisenhower Auditorium. Student tickets are $5 each.